At the height of the vicious storms on April 3, employees at Service King’s headquarters in Richardson — a former bank — took refuge in the vault.

Some probably smile now at the irony.

Many of Service King’s 23 area collision centers are full of hail- and storm-damaged vehicles, and they are still coming in.

“We can handle additional business, but we’re at capacity at many of our shops,” said Cathy Bonner, chief executive of Service King. “We have 2,400 assignments going three weeks out.”

The number of vehicles seeking repairs is “easily double” what the company usually gets, she said, and many shop employees are likely see at least a 25 percent pay increase over the next few months.

“The storms will have a substantial impact on second-quarter revenue,” Bonner said.

A dozen or more tornadoes tore through the area on the afternoon of April 3, damaging or destroying 600 homes and businesses in Arlington, Lancaster, Forney and other communities.

At least 20,000 vehicles in the area sustained a minimum of $70 million in damage, said Sandra Helin, president of Southwestern Insurance Information Service.

Because the storms hit on a workday, thousands of cars and trucks got pounded on parking lots with hail ranging from 1 inch in diameter to softball-size.

Although damage was not widely spread, the areas that got hit were clobbered.

Many of the vehicles brought to local Caliber Collision Centers, for example, were so heavily damaged that they were quickly written off as total losses.

One of the vehicles Service King is repairing has $10,000 in damage. Caliber brought nine employees in from its shops in California, and many of them will focus initially on dealing with totaled vehicles.

More hands on deck

Five of Caliber’s 16 area centers are already at capacity. Like Service King, Caliber can move work to its less-busy shops in the area to hasten repairs and keep consumer rental-car costs down.

“But we’re definitely on extended hours,” said Todd Dillender, vice president of operations at Lewisville-based Caliber Collision. “We were shut down on Easter Sunday. But we’ll go back to working Saturdays and will stay on that schedule for a while.”

Shortly after the storms, Service King hired 40 additional people for its shops — mostly technicians and other production employees who had previously applied for jobs.

The jobs will be permanent, Bonner said.

Both big collision-repair chains said they can still handle additional storm-damaged vehicles — and expect to get them — as well as vehicles damaged weekly in accidents.

But both acknowledge that the influx of storm-damaged cars and trucks will slow so-called cycle times — the time it typically takes to complete repairs.

Those periods usually average seven or eight working days, Bonner said.

“It depends on the situation, but it is unrealistic to say the cycle times won’t be affected at all,” said Dillender of Caliber Collision.

The flow of storm-damaged vehicles into shops may ease temporarily in the days ahead, but shops will probably then see a new wave of less heavily damaged cars and trucks.

Usually, the most battered vehicles — the ones that can’t be driven — arrive first. Second and third clusters of damaged vehicles hit the shops after people first tend to damage at their homes.

“The heavier-damaged cars were the first to the party,” said Ty Gammill, vice president of sales at Caliber Collision. “But we will soon see the more severe cars tail off and the drivable ones will start coming in.”

Neither Service King nor Caliber Collision would speculate how much the storms will increase their second- and third-quarter revenue.

Both are privately owned, and both say their annual budgets routinely anticipate some storm-related revenue.

Still, said Dillender, “I can tell you it’s not going to hurt.”

Meanwhile, three of Herb’s seven area collision centers are so busy that the company is not scheduling any new storm-related work until late April or early May.

Severe damage

Though some damage to vehicles is light enough to be fixed by paintless dent repair, most can’t even be pounded out, said Alan Walne, chairman of Herb’s.

“A majority of what I’ve seen is panel replacement,” Walne said. “I’m anticipating we’re going to see a high percentage of totals.”

Even with the total losses, body shop workers will be busy into the summer, he said.

“We went through an extended [hail] drought from about 2003 or 2004 to last year,” Walne said. “But when you get it, everybody in this business stays busy and does pretty well.”

Area new-car dealerships, which sustained relatively light damage from the storms, should soon feel the economic effects of the storm as owners of totaled vehicles begin looking for replacements.

Based on what body shops are seeing, as many as 5,000 vehicles may be written off.

“It’s still a little early,” said Lee Chapman, president of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan New Car Dealers Association. “But here in the next week or two, we will see an influx of customers coming in who need to replace damaged vehicles.”

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